Franklin County Master Gardeners work with local expert to protect Monarch butterflies

Vaughn Erickson talks a group of Franklin County Master Gardeners about the mating habits of the Monarch butterfly before releasing them for a migration period on Thursday, September 03, 2015. Ryan Blackwell Public Opinion(Photo: )

CHAMBERSBURG >> Monarch butterflies are some of the most unique animals on this planet. They are also some of the rarest, so the Penn State Extension Master Gardeners are attempting to do something about that through their Monarch Butterfly Relocation Rescue.

It all started when Master Gardener Nancy Miller noticed her milkweed plants in her garden were disappearing. Milkweed is the only food that monarch butterflies and caterpillars eat. She did some examining and when she found a 3-inch caterpillar, "that's when I started looking," she said.

Miller said that it was "the luck of the draw" that one of her plants began attracting the caterpillars since she "never got the caterpillars before".

The life cycle of a Monarch butterfly is an amazing one. The larvae eat milkweed until they grow to become caterpillars, at which point they enter a silk cocoon. This stage of the process is when the soon-to-be butterfly is called a chrysalis. It takes about 10-14 days for the chrysalis stage to be completed and the end result is a monarch butterfly.

The Monarchs that are born in late summer are the ones to make the arduous journey to Mexico or California for the winter, according the website MonarchWatch.org. Monarchs born east of the Rocky Mountains will travel to Mexico or Florida and the ones born west of the Rockies will travel to southern California. However, the average life span for a Monarch is only six to eight months in the wild, so the Monarchs that do survive the journey to Mexico or California, will not be the ones to return to lay eggs.

The larvae that result from the eggs laid will be the fourth generation, or the great-grandchildren of the Monarchs that traveled south the year prior, according to MonarchWatch.org. These Monarchs know by instinct the exact route their ancestors took and oftentimes return to the very same tree their ancestors inhabited.

These are just some of the things that make Monarchs worth saving, but in order to do so, the Master Gardeners needed some help.

Miller has a friend named Vaughn Erickson who is something of a butterfly expert. He retired in 2003 and when he did, he took up interacting with insects as a hobby. Erickson has his own butterfly house in his backyard where he raises both monarchs and swallowtails. According to Master Gardener Laurie Collins, when the Master Gardeners recently started a butterfly class, Erickson was asked to come talk specifically about monarchs.

After seeing him speak, he was the go-to guy to provide the Master Gardeners with the information they needed to see their monarch butterfly relocation project through. The Master Gardeners on Aug. 22 transferred the caterpillars from Miller's garden to their Demonstration Pollinator Garden on Franklin Farm Lane, where they would enter the chrysalis stage before ultimately emerging as Monarch butterflies.

The group then met with Erickson on Thursday afternoon and he provided them the information they needed to make sure that their flock would survive.

In order to complete the project and preserve the monarchs, Collins said they are going to need "everybody on board."

"It would be a shame to lose this butterfly," Collins said.

Erickson plans to release his monarch butterflies in the coming week, and it will be the end of the month that they begin flying away toward Mexico or Florida.